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Owning your own home was once considered a rite of passage, but for increasing numbers of people in Britain today, it’s now out of reach.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the chances of a young adult on a middle income owning a home has more than halved over the past two decades. The average house price for the UK in December 2018 was £230,776. The Council of Mortgage Lenders has found the average deposit for a first-time buyer in the UK is £32,841.

All of this is forcing ever increasing numbers of people into renting privately. A quarter of all households in the UK are expected to rent privately by the end of 2021, but renting is hardly an affordable alternative when tenants in England are handing on average 27 per cent of their income straight to their landlord.

‘#tinyhouse has nearly one million posts on Instagram shared by people all over the world who are considering downsizing and opting to live with less’

Aside from the familiar refrain, “we need to build more houses”, mainstream solutions to Britain’s housing crisis continue to fall short. Meanwhile, a movement which advocates for alternative ways of living is growing on social media.

Unable to buy and sick of renting, some people are looking to the tiny house movement for hope. #tinyhouse has nearly one million posts on Instagram shared by people all over the world who are considering downsizing and opting to live with less.

But it’s not as simple as finding a piece of land and building a tiny house on it. There are still planning regulations which may apply depending on the size of the structure and how long you intend to keep it up. As harmless as the tiny house movement sounds, these regulations matter because without them, landlords could start trying to rent out all kinds of structures to people who can’t afford market rent.

Three people who have joined the movement in Britain tell i about the reality of going off grid – quite literally – and living in a tiny home.

Building my home cost £10,000

Florence Hamer, 25, is a carpenter who lives in Berkshire. She is on an apprentice’s wage and earns around £13,000 a year. Florence has been building her own moveable timber-framed tiny home for the last year with help from her cousin. In a few weeks, she’ll be moving the 16ft flat trailer it sits on to Hay-on-Wye where she’s about to start a new job. Once there, she’ll park the house on a friend’s farm.

“I had the idea to do this after staying in a tiny house in Australia for three months. It was an amazing space to live in – built from natural materials, well-crafted and well thought-out. When I got back to the UK, I started looking at flat shares and just thought, ‘I don’t want to pay to live in any of these’,” she explains.

“I remember thinking, I work full time but there’s no way I’m going to be able to buy a house any time soon and renting will be a stretch. It seemed to make sense to try something else.”

‘I have a small bathtub which I’ve reclaimed from a canal boat and I can only have a limited amount of stuff. I’ll be living a life that requires fewer resources than someone living in a flat’

Her tiny house has two rooms downstairs and a sleeping loft upstairs.

The tiny house movement is where cabin porn meets minimalism, where environmental concerns and Generation Rent come together.

“I’ve thought a lot about environmental concerns,” she says. “I’ve always tried to live a life which is as unimpactful as it can be. I have a small bathtub which I’ve reclaimed from a canal boat and I can only have a limited amount of stuff. I’ll be living a life that requires fewer resources than someone living in a flat. I think people are going to have to wake up to how much they consume.”

Not everyone has responded positively, though. “I’ve found a lot of people are very sceptical – they think it’s really off the wall or a ‘hippie lifestyle’, but it’s not.”

Florence says she has spent £10,000 on building her tiny home, of which £5,000 came from savings and another £5,000 was a loan from her parents. She feels she’ll be having the last laugh because she is now “rent and mortgage free”.

“I think our generation has woken up to a different way of living. You don’t have to follow the conventional path of buying a house and then buying a bigger one. We don’t have to live that way just because our parents did. One day, I hope to build myself a bigger house.”

But not everyone has the option of borrowing money from parents or knows someone with farmland to spare. So, when it comes to tiny homes, is there still a reasonable amount of privilege required to make it work? “I know I’m very lucky,” Florence says.

I spent £36,000 building my home

Flaviana Gaiga is a 42-year-old architect living near Milton Keynes. Originally from Brazil, she has lived in the UK since 2007 and earns £36,000 a year. Flaviana has designed an “experimental house” on wheels which she moved into a little over a year ago after paying for it to be built.

“I wanted to find a place of my own because I was living in a shared house with six people,” Flaviana says. “I enjoyed it for a while, but you can’t control other people’s hygiene and you don’t have the amount of privacy you would like in a house share.”

‘I realised I’d be putting around 70 to 75 per cent of my income into paying rent on my own every month which was quite scary’

Once she started looking at buying or renting alone, however, she found there was very little she could afford.

“I realised I’d be putting around 70 to 75 per cent of my income into paying rent on my own every month which was quite scary, so I decided to build a tiny house.” Flaviana’s tiny home has two main rooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom. She designed it to fit a couple but currently lives there by herself.

“All in, I spent £36,000, which was my entire savings. But I have no monthly repayments and it’s really cheap to run because I use mostly solar power and rainwater.”

Because there are restrictions on where people can park these structures, like Florence, Flaviana has an agreement with a local farmer. She pays £100 a month to share their land.

The number of people in their 40s who rent has doubled. Flaviana sees living in a tiny house as a long-term lifestyle choice, not just a temporary fix to the housing crisis.

“So many people want to live alone but can’t afford to – this is a great way to make that happen. In a house share, you don’t have control over your environment, your housemates and how they behave – it’s cheaper to live in a tiny house and you can live how you like.”

The amount spent by Flaviana on her tiny home is close to the average deposit put down by a first-time buyer today. And, while she’s happy with her set up, her home is unlikely to go up in value in the same way a conventional house or flat would. She might also struggle to sell it on should she need to.

But Flaviana feels she now has more control over every aspect of her life. “The lifestyle I have now is much more conscious. I’m hyper-aware of what I consume and how I consume because I simply don’t have much space. Downsizing makes you think about what you’re buying – clothes, shoes, food, objects. I don’t produce much waste. I’m absolutely in love with it.”

‘It’s very basic, but I’m happy’

Catrina Davies is a 40-year-old freelance writer who does gardening, cleaning and waitressing on the side and earns about £7,000 per year. She has lived in a corrugated iron hut in Cornwall for nearly a decade and recently wrote a book about her experiences: Homesick: Why I live in a shed (published by Quercus).

“Before I lived here I was renting in Bristol. I was working all hours, but I could barely afford the £400 a month rent. It felt very precarious and the room I was living in wasn’t supposed to be rented out so whenever the landlord came round I had to pretend I didn’t live there. It got to the point where I felt really unsafe, fed-up, and crushed by it all,” she says.

Catrina affectionately refers to her six by 18 feet home as ‘the shed’. It was once her dad’s office.

‘When I first moved in it didn’t have electricity or a toilet. It does now, but I still don’t have hot running water and it’s not insulated’

“It’s very basic. When I first moved in it didn’t have electricity or a toilet. It does now, but I still don’t have hot running water and it’s not insulated. My biggest expense is internet which costs £40 a month.”

Catrina didn’t move into the shed thinking of it as a permanent home and living there has been difficult at times. “Downsizing has been good and bad for my mental health. In the winter when it’s dark it’s hard, without a doubt.”

Catrina Davies

However, as time goes by, Catrina says she increasingly feels she has all she needs.

“It’s better than I ever thought it could be. Living very simply has proved to be liberating in unexpected ways. I feel healthier physically and I spend more time outside. It’s more sustainable for me and I’m not sure if I need more.”

Housing has only become more unaffordable since Catrina made the decision to downsize. She thinks more people should consider alternative solutions.

“We’re obsessed with the idea of housing being a certain way and costing a certain amount and I don’t subscribe to that at all anymore. We’ve become totally disconnected from nature and we build our housing with no thought for the environment, for the things we need to live alongside – like scrubland – which is important for the ecosystem,” she reflects.

“The longer I live here the more outrageous conventional houses seem. There’s so much waste – I’ve learned I can do without so much quite easily.”

But Catrina is also in a unique position because the shed came into her life via family – few people have that coming to them. It also hasn’t been registered as a residential property, which means it’s not technically legal for her to be living in it.

Making their lives smaller and more compact is considered a solution by Florence, Flaviana and Catrina – three single women without children – but whether it could ever be a mainstream solution to Britain’s chronic shortage of secure and affordable housing at a time when the number of homeless families is rising is definitely up for debate.

As doctors and psychiatrists, we have seen the devastating effects of benefit reform on our patients

The next Tory leadership election will be all about class

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